Category Archives: Application

For all regarding application

A Simple Adsense Sidebar Widget for WordPress

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For those who visit this site to download the adsense sidebar widget for WordPress, I have some good news for you. I spent some hours to rewrite the widget and now release the code to public. This version offers the same functionality with the previous version which is displaying Google Adsense on the sidebar. However, it’s been known the previous version has compatibility problem with recent WordPress. If you’re a fan of simple widget, this one might also fit you.

More information about this widget is provided below:
Widget Name: Amikelive Google Adsense Widget
Widget Version: 0.5
Feature: Displaying Google Adsense on sidebar based on given Adsense info
Compatibility: WordPress > 2.8.x
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Sizzling Upload Progress Bar in PHP with APC, Part 1: APC Installation

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After some series of “political” technical notes, I think it’s the right moment to supply some more technical posts to fellow developers. This time I will write about creating sizzling upload progress bar in PHP. In the past, there had been heated debate in PHP internal list about RFC 1867 implementation on PHP core code. If you were there, you might still remember that we had to patch the file main/rfc1867.c and some other files and then recompile PHP to get the upload progress bar hack working. Some harsh critics even mentioned that without the built-in capability of upload progress, PHP was years behind Java and Perl and lacked its capability as a web programming language.

Fortunately, since PHP 5.2 (especially after PHP 5.2.6 release), showing upload progress is not a big deal in PHP. Thanks to APC developers -mostly are also core PHP developers- who contributed to changes in APC that led to the availability of this long-waited feature. With APC we’ll be able to track the progress of file upload and provide our users better convenience when using our application.

Still, APC is not a part of core PHP shipped as a bundled package. We need to install it manually. In Windows, we can simply load the dll file to get it working. However, Linux users may need some pointers about how to install and enable this package. Hence, I will provide some guide for APC installation which was tested on veteran RHEL 4 and energetic young Fedora 10. So, let’s just go to the installation part. Continue reading →

Quick Notes On Google Adsense Sidebar Widget for WordPress

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Adsense on WordPressIn my earlier post, I contributed my updated version to Google Adsense Sidebar Widget on WordPress based on  previous work by Mike Smullin. I received some comments about errors in implementing the widget. This weekend, as I mentioned earlier, I decided to take further investigation to know the root cause of the malfunction.

I compared two references i could find. The first is right from the dashboard of my Google Adsense publisher account and the later is Google’s documentation for Adsense API. There should be another reference from Mike Smullin’s own work but since he’s now charging for the plugin, I’d better have someone send me the plugin to be analyzed and synchronized with my update.

After reading the documentation and  toying with my account, I’d like to provide some notes regarding google adsense implementation:

1. Google Adsense API

This API provides programmatical way to modify and manage the ads. It uses SOAP web service with available callbacks listed in its published WSDL. The API will enable a user to manage his adsense account without logging in into his Google Adsense account. Instead, the third party application communicates with Google server to update the modification executed by user while utilizing the application.

However, WordPress widget expects simple configuration values for each of the widget. Rearchitecting existing widget to support SOAP communication is a bit out-of-boundary and redundant. I’ll explain this in the subsequent point. Continue reading →

Adsense Widget For WordPress Sidebar: Updated Version

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I use Adsense widget for WordPress Sidebar from Mike Smullin in this technology blog. It’s a simple widgetized plugin and I really like its simplicity. I was never bugged by this plugin until today when I found strange behavior when using this plugin for WordPress > 2.3.1. If I updated other widget positions and then tried to click configuration values for this plugin, I got empty form. Initially, I thought the configuration values were not saved properly and somehow missing (although later I found out that the data was still saved in the database, it was just not displayed). Hence, I decided to do further investigation and spend some time to provide bug fixes.

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Free PHP Open Source Ecommerce Shopping Carts – Reviews and Prospects

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Being a store owner or company that sell goods or products to customers will usually make you think how to maintain or even increase the sales. One viable solution is by selling online. By putting products on the internet, products will be exposed to larger audience and there will be bigger chance to improve the sales. There is traditional merchants that help people selling products like eBay. Using eBay service, after registering you can simply put your homepage and start selling. However, with more various products and goods you offer and more control you need over your sales, hosting and operating your own shopping cart can be a better solution.

This article will provide comparisons among different popular shopping carts software available on the internet. As every businessman tends to minimize operational cost, only free open source ecommerce shopping carts will be compared and reviewed. The scope is also narrowed to PHP based shopping carts as most budget-wise hostings support PHP.

There are some free carts offered on the net but not so many are popular. Here, we’ll discuss 4 free shopping carts worth considering. The list includes osCommerce, ZenCart, VirtueMart, and Magento. To give you some idea about the popularity of these carts, let’s use data from Google Trends:

Google trends for some php open source shopping carts
Recent Google trends for some PHP Shopping Carts

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